Set and Use Custom SMS Text Tones for iPhone

Update: The iPhone text tone can be changed to anything after iOS 5.

Tired of hearing the same text message alert tone on your iPhone despite who the incoming SMS arrives from? Would you like to set a custom SMS tone to individual contacts? In either case you’ll be excited to learn you can do both of these with the newer iPhone iOS updates.

To set a custom text tone for a specific contact:

• Go into the contact and tap on ‘Edit’
• Look underneath ringtone you’ll see “text tone”, tap on that
• Select the new sound to play for that users sms tone, it can be adjusted from the default tri-tone to other alert tones

I use custom ringtones all the time for contacts so being able to set a custom text tone is a great feature. There is no word yet on whether or not you’ll be able to create your own custom text tones like you can with custom made ringtones, but if I had to guess I’d say they are probably going to be playing the same .m4r filetype suggesting the creation of unique tones is a possibility.

This requires iOS 4 or later to change the text tone, and iOS 5 or later supports setting the text tone to custom tones.